Alice Upside Down by Isabelle Simler

Alice in Wonderland illustrated by Isabelle Simler @isabellesimler 

published by @edcourtesetlongues in 2025 

 

 

The reversible cover is an invitation to vertigo, a deck of cards that opens into the rabbit hole and, on the other side of the earth, Alice appears among people walking upside down. Perhaps Isabelle herself walks that way, to see the world from another angle. 

The feeling of falling is emphasized by the sequence of gloves, Alice’s and the Rabbit’s, waving as the girl holds the flamingo and drinks a cup of mushroom tea. On the back cover, the card-hole turns into the Rabbit’s house, and we begin to glimpse what this Isabelle, acrobat of perspectives, can do with framings and angles that make us doubt whether our heads are still in place. 

The endpapers, with subtle silhouettes of Alice and the Rabbit, speak of journey, growth, and transformation, of losing and finding oneself in the forest. We are crossed by the Rabbit’s movement, who has already escaped the page, running across the grass near the bored girl. From emptiness to a garden full of insects meticulously drawn, we follow Isabelle the entomologist, who loves colors, petals, and tiny wings, and invites us to search for enigmas hidden in the grass and margins of the page. 

 Queen of metamorphoses, she turns the rabbit hole into a plant, a strand of hair, a spiral, a passage inward. The Rabbit plays across the spread, unfolding into metonymies and metaphors of deep descent. We see in fragments and are invited to expand the imaginal field, to complete the motion, the landscape becoming body. 

 

 

 

 The hole opens across a double page in unexpected curves. Where is the Rabbit? Where is Alice? Have we already become rabbits and Alices falling into our own impossible thoughts? Small clues invite us to keep traveling, falling, falling, falling. Between wide landscapes and minute details, the upside-down girl leads us inside the burrow as coauthors of this world revealed through visual ellipses and hints. 

Doors within doors, and I wonder if I am dreaming, or if I am part of someone else’s dream. I am swept away by suggestions and vertigo. Isabelle pulls me into the book, showing the scene from Alice’s point of view. I become Alice, looking at my own hands. 

The girl who walks upside down knows how to play with the limits of the page, its edges and folds, what appears and what hides. She invites the reader’s gaze to cross over. Zas. I feel the transparencies in her subtle lines. I run with the strokes, across the borders, through fur and foliage. It is the art of losing oneself and daydreaming in the fullness of incompleteness. 

At times I am Alice, at others I fly out of the book. A girl swinging among cocoons, who already mastered the riddle of the Caterpillar. A mushroom-becoming girl who not only walks upside down but also turns into cocoon, butterfly, mushroom, pure becoming and transformation. 

 

 

 No portmanteau word could contain her infinite becoming. The upside-down girl invites us to play at losing and finding ourselves among colors, lines, desires, and tuned deliriums. It makes you want to slide along the Cheshire Cat’s whiskers, and we feel grateful to have heard this story so many times, just to see a new girl turn it all upside down again. 

She surprises us with cups, creatures with beaks, feet, and wings, hybrid animals that recall Carroll’s insects playing at being and not being. In this surreal dream I rediscover my curiosity. It is beautiful how she recreates Time, since the Hatter confides that if we become his friends, he will make the clock do whatever we wish. The art of losing and finding oneself in the forest demands pacts with Time. 

 The slit in the tree leads me to a place I’ve visited a thousand times, yet peek at for the first. The Queen turns into a paper doll with paper clothes, and we enter the territory of play and childhood. We keep growing and shrinking among details and open scenes that seem to choreograph our breathing. 

This book is a dance, a silent symphony, a banquet of edible flowers, a teacup brewed from a special species of mushroom not yet catalogued by science. 

We dive to the ocean floor and return to the surface of the playing cards, to the absurdities of Alice’s trial, as if after so much reverie there could still be room for law. 

 The upside-down girl turns me once more into Alice, suspended between dream and reality, where everything spins in spirals, where I no longer even doubt who I am and no doubt makes sense. 

 I return to the garden.

 I return to the margin.

 I return to the dream-girl, the one of always and never. 

And can I still doubt why I love this book so much? 

 

 

 Thanks to @Seperluxus, and if you’d like to see more images from the book, you can visit her Instagram.

ALICE COLLECTORS: Kristina, the time traveler of wonderlands

@alicesadventurescollection 

 Kristina’s collection is a living bridge between centuries, a library of dreams where antique editions meet contemporary creations. Originally from Lithuania and now based in the USA, she began collecting around 2019, drawn by a childhood fascination with Alice’s courage to be curious and different. Curious, careful and disciplined, she maintains coherence in the creation of her posts like a true cataloguer. 

Her shelves trace an atlas of illustrators, mapping Alice’s global journey through time, style and imagination. Rare old books share space with signed editions and artistic interpretations from all over the world. What matters most to her is not the style, but the artist, especially those she doesn’t yet have. 

She participates in collector groups with an intense exchange of references and information with people from every continent, cultivating deep friendships through this shared curiosity. Her aesthetic is calm and elegant, with books, figures and props photographed with care, creating intimate scenes where every spine and cover tells part of her adventure through wonderlands. 

She treasures the friendships made through collecting, companions who share her devotion to Carroll’s imagination. Her dream item is the edition illustrated by Japanese artist Hiroko Hanna ( @hannalice2023 )

For Kristina, collecting is not about possession but connection. Each book is a mirror reflecting creativity, memory and the timeless joy of following the White Rabbit.

 

 

ALICE COLLECTORS: Yonatan Hyman - A Collection as an Atlas of Imagination

 @collecting_alice / collectingalice.com 

 If you have ever held a vintage edition of Alice in Wonderland with no artist credited and felt that peculiar mix of beauty and mystery, you will feel at home in Yonatan Hyman’s universe. He is the mind behind Collecting Alice, a project that unfolds between Instagram and his website like a quiet archive of visual memory, gathering twentieth-century editions with a focus on illustration history. His passion began around 1995, when he first read Carroll’s Alice in English and fell in love with its wit, absurdity and dry humor. 

What started as curiosity slowly transformed into a meticulous archival practice. From his home in Israel, his shelves now hold Hebrew translations, political parodies, ornate Art Nouveau and Art Deco editions, early color printings and obscure illustrated versions from across the globe. Among his most treasured pieces are editions given to him by his late father, early Punch magazine prints featuring Tenniel’s work, Gwynedd Hudson’s books, and a first printing illustrated by Willy Pogany. 

Among the images he shares, some stand out for their unexpected intimacy, like the wooden chairs he had made while traveling in Malawi, East Africa, around 1996: objects that quietly mark his collecting life. Yonatan’s taste gravitates toward richly designed vintage editions. He is attentive to texture and print quality, to the weight of thick paper, the charm of embossed covers and the quiet dignity of early printing techniques. His captions mix gentle irony, historical insight and tender nostalgia. 

When he posts an anonymous illustration, he often writes: “Ah, the good old days when you could publish a book packed with beautiful art without bothering to name the artist.” His posts invite viewers to look closely, compare visual details and trace the evolution of graphic design across decades. 

Explore more at collectingalice.com, where each edition becomes a small piece of a larger cartography of imagination, mapping the many visual lives of Alice through the eyes of a devoted collector.

 

 

 

 

ALICE COLLECTORS: David, the wanderer of illustrated Wonderlands

 @wonderlandillustrated 

 

Collector, traveler, and researcher, David transforms his Instagram collection into a visual journey through the infinite metamorphoses of Alice. With more than 200 books from around the world and over a thousand posts, his collection celebrates illustration as a living art of transformation, where each edition becomes a portal and each artist a new mirror through which Wonderland reflects itself. He moves between shelves and landscapes with the same curiosity that guided Alice. 

His feed is a dynamic collage of wonder, where books, travels, and encounters are woven into a patchwork of imagination. He photographs Alicedelic places around the world, his images often slightly tilted, escaping the orthogonal order of the ordinary, as if reality itself were leaning toward dream. David also creates short videos on the visual afterlives of Carroll’s stories. Along the way, he meets illustrators such as Oleg Lipchenko, Miraphora Mina, and Eduardo Lima, as well as other collectors who share his passion for the many faces of Wonderland. 

In his own words, “I love the story, the characters, the world, the escapism. I also love how each illustrator and artist can explore the story in their own unique way and how they are so different. It’s exciting to see a new take on the story and rediscover the vintage and classic illustrations and how they inspire future artists.” 

Among the treasures in his library are editions by Robert Ingpen, Chris Riddell, Helen Oxenbury, Christian Birmingham, and David Delamare, as well as a rare French edition illustrated by Daniel Dupuy. His dream book is the Japanese edition by @hannalice2023, whose delicate imagery and subtle surrealism captured his imagination. 

For David, Alice is both memory and metamorphosis, a story that keeps reinventing itself through the hands and eyes of those who dare to imagine. 

 

 

ALICE COLLECTORS: Caterina in Wonderland

 @cateaparty 

“Alice is part of me,” she says. “I feel a lot like her. It contains many things that I love.” 

Caterina turns her collection into a poetic ritual. In her photos, dolls, books and scenes of tea and forest blend daily gestures with dreamlike reverie. An Italian interior designer, she began collecting in 2003 and now shares her Wonderland through more than 150 posts to more than 2000 followers on Instagram. 

A careful cosplayer, she often dresses as Alice and performs within her own photos, creating her personal Wonderland where fiction and life intertwine. Her collection is eclectic, mixing books, dolls, costumes, makeup, miniatures and themed objects, with a special affection for Disney interpretations. 

Her feed is a cabinet of imagination where books, teacups, mirrors and memorabilia appear like still-life scenes of wonder. Each image is composed with the precision of a set designer and the sensibility of a storyteller, evoking the spirit of the Mad Tea Party and the intimacy of secret diaries. She collects modern and vintage editions, organizing her shelves by color, turning them into chromatic landscapes of fantasy.

 For Caterina, collecting Alice is also about belonging to a community of Mad Hatters and kindred spirits, a place where riddles, trades and discoveries are constantly shared. “I hope to bring a little magic to the people who follow me ✨,” she writes, and her photographs do exactly that, transforming collecting into a tender form of self-portrait and a celebration of curiosity, beauty and the art of keeping enchantment alive. 

The last image, a dreamy illustration that she uses as her Instagram avatar: perfectly condenses her world of wonder: intimate, playful and luminously Alicean.

 

 

ALICE COLLECTORS: Jules and the Art of Becoming Who You Are

 @ fortheloveofalice_ 

 

Among the new generation of Carrollian collectors, Jules shines with rare harmony between passion and creation. Her collection began in 2009, inspired by the Disney film, and soon expanded into a lifelong devotion to all things Alice. What started as a childhood fascination became an artistic vocation, and she is now illustrating her own Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, reimagined through the dreamlike landscapes of Los Angeles, where she lives. 

Her shelves combine vintage and modern editions, catalogued with care and often arranged by color, turning her library into a chromatic landscape of wonder. Among her treasures is a rare edition illustrated by A. E. Jackson, alongside other vintage gems such as the elusive edition by John R. Neill, which links her love for Alice to her passion for Oz. 

As an artist, Jules values editions that reveal both beauty and intention: unique covers not repeated inside, illustrations that flow through the story, and characters whose style expresses imagination and individuality. 

For Jules, Alice became a language of self-discovery. As a trans woman, dressing as Alice was part of her journey toward authenticity, a step toward inhabiting her own truth. Her collection reflects that unfolding, a luminous archive where identity and imagination continue to grow together. Among the photos of her collection, one image stands apart: the puppy from Wonderland, the only illustration by Jules herself.